Moulton & Kyle Funeral Home

After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1851, Calvin Oak was told he would be dead within six months. Oak decided to move his family from Vermont to Jacksonville, Florida in hopes that a warmer, sunny environment would cure his ailment. Surrounded by fresh air, Calvin Oak lived another 30 years and became one of Jacksonville’s most prominent businessmen. He built the first factory in the city, a gun plant that manufactured guns, barrels, and cartridges. Oak also purchased and operated a jewelry store on Bay Street. In 1856, Calvin Oak and his son, Byron, opened a marble and mortuary business. After his father passed away, Byron continued growing the company as the Moulton & Kyle Funeral Home.

The power remains on although the funeral home has been abandoned for years.

In 1914, Mark & Shetfall, a local architecture firm, was hired to design a two-story Prairie School style building at 17 West Union Street in downtown Jacksonville. Due to high demand for parking, an attached garage was built several years later. The garage featured a turntable which allowed cars to drive in and turn around facing the street. The funeral home became known as the Kyle-McLellan Funeral Home after S.M. McLellan purchased the business. In the early 1990s, the Peeples Family Funeral Home purchased the property. After almost a century of operating at the West Union Street building, the business was moved in 2013. The building at West Union Street was left to decay. Today, the building has a partially collapsed roof and stands at the mercy of the harsh Florida weather. Check out my book, Abandoned North Florida, for more photos from this amazing abandoned funeral home.

Water damage from the partially collapsed roof has caused mold to grow and the paint to peel.Remnants of the antique furniture in the lobby of the funeral home.A Cadillac hearse is entombed in the garage of the old funeral home.Hazardous chemicals left behind in the embalming room.The upstairs included a display room for caskets, several family rooms, and a storage area for the extra caskets.

Cremated remains of 3 women dated from the 1950s are forgotten on a shelf.

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Published by Abandoned Southeast

Welcome to AbandonedSoutheast.com!
My obsession with abandoned places has inspired me to create this blog. My goal is to showcase the obscure, historic often forgotten places I have visited across the Southeast. I hope to preserve the past through documentation and photographs. You can reach me at AbandonedSoutheast@gmail.com
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Wow..your photography is wonderful and the story these photos tell are worth the time it took to take them. Amazing the things we leave behind and those boxes with the cremated remains of those three women! I wonder why they were left behind… Thanks for sharing! 🙂

I thought of that too. Somebody could easily find family members. Sad. Also wondering why they would leave behind such valuable items and not move them to the new building. Wondering if they had any looting of furniture, etc.

I’m a funeral director in Tennessee. I have 16 sets of cremains at my funeral home that the families do not want for various reasons. Many are pathetic reasons they should be ashamed of . Not everyone is as caring as you and I are. The longer the cremains sit the harder it is to reunite with a family member willing to take them. I had a “wife” threaten to sue me for reaching out to her step daughter to pick up her father’s cremains because the new wife didn’t want them. The new wife didn’t want them but she didn’t want his own daughter to have them either. In Tennessee after 90 days we (the funeral home) can legally dispose of unclaimed cremains as we see fit, but our attorneys are still afraid of lawsuits and advise us to hang onto them. My oldest set in storage is from 1983. There are two sets among the 16 that are veterans that we can inurn at the national cemetery in Chattanooga. It’s heartbreaking, it really is.

I’ve photographed a lot of abandoned places but nothing as creepy and poignant as this funeral home. You handled it with skill showing what needs to be shown and the history you provided allows us to really get to know this place along with your photographs.

I was told by a mortision in Huntsville AL that they have by law to keep cremains no matter how long they can’t even inter them. They have to stay. Check f homes in area your uncle cremains may be there

I would love to know if anything from this funeral home can be legally removed and kept, since it all appears to be abandoned. As a death educator with a licensed embalmer in the family, we would be highly interested in claiming any of these items for historical and educational purposes. Do you have any idea whom to contact about this? Thanks!

These photographs remind me of a foreclosed funeral home I toured while working for a bank. It was an old black funeral home. Not sure what year they opened but the quality of equipment and furniture was certainly not elegant. Some of the setup and techniques used in the embalming room were sad. In my instance I can understand everything being left “as is”. But I can’t imagine why a business would just walk away and leave everything (including business records and unclaimed bodies) just to move across town. Why do you think no one ever went back to clean stuff out?

This has to be the result of a family argument. The funeral home appears to be upscale, so people who buy good caskets and have good ceremonies usually see the funeral home as a sacred place, a tomb that beloved family members were care for, washed and prepared. This is not only a strange incident, it is a strange part of the city, any city.

It greatly concerns me if there’s a pipe organ in the funeral home’s chapel that’s left to decay. Since it is a very old, prestigious funeral parlor, I’m assuming a pipe organ was installed in the facility. I’ve had many long bouts of depression, sadness and crying spells after seeing what has happened to chapel and church organs that were abandoned and destroyed by evil, sadistic vandals, rodents and the elements. Something needs to be done (laws enacted?) to ensure that these magnificent instruments are rescued, housed and protected from any further harm.